ABSTRACT
The antagonism toward the Jewish religion of the German idealists underwent "a progressive vulgarization" through Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and then Ludwig Feuerbach and the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, the last of whom was Marx's particular mentor. Marx's form of antisemitism was a dress rehearsal for Marxism itself. Later in the century, August Bebel would coin the phrase, much used by Lenin: "Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools." The militant socialism that Marx adopted in the later 1840s can be seen as an expanded and transmuted form of his earlier antisemitism. The Jewish world-conspiracy theory was not so much abandoned as extended to include the entire bourgeois class. Marx retained the fundamental fallacy that the making of money through trade and finance is essentially a parasitical activity, but he now placed it on the basis not of race or religion, but of class.
